I’ve been trying to get myself organized this week in terms of planning and preparing for the experiments I want to do on my larvae.The very first question I hope to be able to answer is: What are the crystals made out of? So far we have come up with two procedures to investigate this: soaking larvae in Calcein and then viewing them using florescence microscopy, and performing the murexide test on extracted crystals.

chiton larva with Calcein treatment

Calcein is a substance that can be used to “tag” calcium inside an organism. If you soak animals in Calcein while they are forming structures that contain calcium, the dye gets incorporated into them and can be detected using florescence microscopy. I soaked my larvae in various concentrations of Calcein during the time I knew the structures were forming, and compared these treatments to a control. My findings are complicated by the fact that the disco balls exhibit autofluorescence. This means they glow brightly under the microscope whether they are treated with Calcein or not. This is a prime example of why controls are important! I have to process the images I took of the treatments and controls to see if there is any difference in the glowing with and without the treatment.

I also want to do a uric acid test on the crystals. There is a procedure called the murexide test that can be used for this (thank you gout). We are hoping to be able to suck the disco balls out of the animals and test the crystals. We have uric acid in the lab, so I am going to do a test with known uric acid to make sure the procedure works, and to see what a positive result looks like. We also have to get the crystals out… but we’ll talk about that next week.

Takeaways:

Nothing works the first time

Sometimes you have to try a lot of different things before you find one thing that *might* work

Patience and optimism are extraordinarily valuable qualities in any person but especially any scientist

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​Hi readers! My name is Christina Ellison and I am a Marine Biology major in my senior year at the University of Oregon. I was born in southern California, raised in Utah, and have lived, worked, and studied in Salt Lake City, Ojai, New York City and Eugene. I am also a painter, and sometimes a writer and a dancer. Whatever else I may be, I try to be a liver first. I strive to foster a sense of connectedness to the world around me, and to open myself to the wonder that is life, and death, and change, and beauty in all its many forms. I am fascinated by marine life and processes, and by living things in general. I can become interested in most things if given enough background, and as I develop my own understanding and find a way to put myself to work. My work as a student has inspired a deep appreciation for both the diversity and unity of living things, and for the scientific process. I am not only a student to the facts, but to the process by which we come to regard them as such. I think the scientific process is the pure spirit of curiosity with the moral responsibility and the discipline not to get attached to any theory or outcome, or in any case, not to let our hopes, or our biases, interfere with the conclusions we draw from honest work. Ultimately, it is the process that facilitates our understanding of, and thus our relationship to, the world around us. My interests in marine biology remain very broad. I am interested in ecology and organismal biology. I like learning about how bodies work, how they interface with their environments, and how interactions between individuals scale up to inform community structure. I have also recently become interested in the life history of marine organisms.

I wanted to participate in the REU program because I want to gain research skills, but also because I want to gain confidence in myself as a scientist, and in my ability to participate in, and make valuable contributions to, the scientific community. I want to learn how to frame questions and develop means to test different theories in an informative and reproducible way. To be a beginner is a necessary point of departure, and it can feel overwhelming, but one can waste a lot of time thinking about how to get started before actually just starting something. I thought this would be a good opportunity to start. I am considering a career in research, and think this experience will help me gain a sense of what that entails, and whether it is the path I want to pursue. Richard Emlet is my faculty mentor in the program. I feel very grateful to have such an inspired and knowledgeable person and scientist in my corner showing me the ropes. I am very excited to be working in his lab, and to see where all our projects take us.